


Navsegda

by giddytf2



Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Angst, F/M, M/M, Multi, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-28
Updated: 2013-04-28
Packaged: 2017-12-09 19:26:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/777148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/giddytf2/pseuds/giddytf2
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'The handwriting is not that of a grieving man, or an enraged man. It’s neat, the letters spaced evenly in straight rows. The handwriting of a calm man. A man who has accepted his fate, no matter the costs.'</p>
            </blockquote>





	Navsegda

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this during a time when I was really feeling down in the dumps. I'm not kidding when I say that this story is an absolute bawl-fest of a Heavy/Medic story. I deliberately didn't add some tags so as to not spoil the story, so for those of you expecting good feels...yeah, read at your discretion. There are also other pairings, but not mentioned to avoid spoilers.
> 
> Also, technically this isn't a story with chapters, it's a one-shot I've split into sections for easier, faster writing. I don't know how else to set it to 'WIP' status.

The large, square package, wrapped in brown paper, arrives at his doorstep at precisely nine in the morning.

For fifteen minutes, Engineer stares at it in the privacy of his workshop behind his house, sitting ramrod straight on a wooden chair, his gloved hands flat on the table on either side of the package. He stares at his name – Dell Conagher – and his address written in bold handwriting in black ink. The handwriting is not that of a grieving man, or an enraged man. It’s neat, the letters spaced evenly in straight rows. The handwriting of a calm man. A man who has accepted his fate, no matter the costs.

Engineer knows that if he turns the package on its left side, he’ll see the name and address of that man. A man he’d worked with for a year in Reliable Excavation Demolition sixteen years ago. Dined with, laughed with, sang American and Russian folk songs with and drank beer with while they were at it. Fought and shed the blood of Builders League United mercenaries side by side in a tiny, unknown war in the vast expanses of the Badlands in New Mexico, so long ago. He’ll see that man’s name, and there’s a damn good chance that he’ll either hurl the package at the wall or just break down right then and there, curse a god he no longer believes in and demand to know why, why is there death if life is so precious, _why must people die?_

So he doesn’t turn the package. He gets up and turns his back on it, and works feverishly on a prototype for a robotic window cleaner he’s been commissioned by an apparel corporation in New York to construct until afternoon. At about four, he drives his candy apple-red 1953 Chevy pick-up to the Lake Travis High School to collect Michael and Elizabeth, and finds them standing around outside the school with their respective groups of friends, chatting and laughing, their faces rubicund with youth, with hope. He parks the pick-up nearby, close enough to observe his kids – no, his _teenagers_ now, teenagers – on their home ground, but not close enough that they’ll see him straightaway.

Michael, just turned seventeen last month, looks so much like him that it’d scare him if he didn’t love his boy as much as he does. Unlike him, however, Michael is at least one and a half feet taller than he is, with a full head of short, brown hair and both hands intact. And Elizabeth, turning fifteen in two months, looks so much like her mother with those long, dark tresses and twinkling blue eyes that sometimes, just glancing at her is enough to make a hard-ass, grown man like him cry.

When her mother died ten years ago from thyroid cancer, it _was_ enough to make him cry on more than one occasion.

Michael is the first to notice the pick-up. His boy – no, going to be a man soon, a _man_ – smiles and waves at him, and he waves back, watching his children saying goodbye to their friends, watching them run up to the family vehicle and climb into the cab with him. On every other school day, they’d greet him and happily barrage him with the current goings-on at school, like what a jerk that Zack was to dump Lisa or how last minute the alterations to football practice times was, annoying everybody on the team or how much the canteen’s mashed potatoes sucks these days.

But today, they go silent when they glance at his face, and Elizabeth asks, “Daddy, is everythin’ okay?”

For the first time in a very long while, he has no idea what to say. He doesn’t want to think about the package waiting with the patience of eons back in his workshop. He doesn’t want to think about what it means that that package is there at all, about the new void that has made itself at home with the other voids within him when the postman handed him the outwardly harmless box that abruptly weighed a ton once he saw its sender’s name. He doesn’t want to lie to Michael and Elizabeth either, no, not with his beautiful Jannie gone, leaving a deep void in their children in her wake.

He smiles and eventually says, “Sure, pumpkin. ‘Course everythin’ is fine with me,” and turns his head to face the windshield as he shifts the pick-up into gear, sensing their eyes upon him. “How was school today?”

They answer him more quietly than usual, more briefly. No one says a word after that. At home, things return to much more familiar semblance of their routine life: The teenagers go to their rooms to unwind while he heads to the kitchen to make preparations for dinner, and later, after showers, they come downstairs to help him out with cooking. Tonight’s meal is baked corn tortillas stuffed with sautéed beef, onions and green chile peppers, topped with sour cream, tomato sauce and Cheddar cheese. It’s Elizabeth’s favorite. It was Jannie’s favorite too.

At the dinner table, Michael makes him laugh so much with an anecdote about his team quarterback’s pants splitting right down the middle during a practice game that he forgets about the package for hours. After dinner, Michael goes to his room to do some homework. Elizabeth stays with him in the living room to watch some television. With her lying on her side on the couch, her head on his thigh, they snicker through an episode of The A-Team, at the cartoonish violence in which bullets fly everywhere and strike nobody and no one bruises or bleeds when hit. It’s a guys’ show, unmistakable from the utter lack of female characters, but he doesn’t mind that Elizabeth watches it as long as he’s there to debunk all the moronic nonsense and educate her on what _really_ happens when a car becomes a burning, mangled wreck or when a man gets socked in the face with a tightened fist or when a helicopter full of passengers goes kaboom mid-air.

His daughter’s no stranger to death. Not anymore.

After Elizabeth kisses him on the cheek and bids him goodnight, he’s alone in the living room with his thoughts. Years ago, he would have dashed to the workshop, to slave over his many contraptions until he keeled over and slept on the floor or the sun rose, whichever came first. It kept the memories, the _pain_ away. Kept him in a constant daze of exhaustion, unable to think much beyond an infinity of mathematical equations and blueprints and _slot tab A into tab B_.

And still, Jannie would appear to him at the zenith of his lethargy, an ethereal form so alive and yet so fragile and transparent.

So he stopped running.

“The damn box’s gonna be there whether ya like it or not, Conagher,” he mutters to himself as he trudges to his workshop, his stone path lit by a black, steel garden lamp post.

Indeed, it’s where he left it this morning, on one of his work tables next to a half-completed, Sentry Buster-like robot sans bomb. It’s a biomedical project with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for advanced leg prostheses for which he still has lots of time to fiddle with and improve, but for all its technological marvels, it doesn’t draw his attention like the brown paper-wrapped package does.

He isn’t sure why he brings it back to the house, to the kitchen where he sets it on the dinner table. He just knows it feels … right. Like he has to open it _here_ , in this place full of bittersweet memories and innocent laughter and lingering, undying hope.

It’s what Heavy would have liked, he knows it. He just does.

The brown paper rips apart with the loudness of rumbling thunder in the hushed kitchen. The thick cupboard box it concealed is no match for the kitchen scissors, and it pops open after he carefully cuts through the adhesive tape and mini-folds holding the cover in place. He sets the scissors on the table surface just as carefully, his eyes honed on the envelope on the very top of the box’s contents, on his first name inscribed in the same bold, black handwriting. He has to squeeze his hands into fists for several seconds before he can grasp the envelope and remove it from the box and set it aside. He knows what’s inside it and he can’t read it. Not yet.

He squeezes his hands again as his eyes take in the other items in the box. Heavy had arranged everything meticulously, with the utmost care, and it shows in the well-ordered stacks of framed photographs, plastic cases and books. This isn’t the handiwork of a devastated man mad with sorrow. This is the handiwork of a man who’d finally found peace. These are his remnants, the most important remnants, of the things he’d loved, the people he’d loved. The people who’d loved him.

Engineer lifts one framed photograph nearer to his face, gazing with half-lidded, gleaming eyes at the studio portrait of Heavy from the waist up. In it, Heavy is dressed in a maroon, long-sleeved turtleneck, giving the camera that trademark, double-row grin, and if Heavy had been alone in the picture, no one would have thought anything peculiar about it.

He isn’t.

“Look at you two lovebirds,” Engineer whispers, telling himself he’s just imagining the croaky edge to his voice. In Heavy’s snug embrace is another man from his old RED days, a slender albeit sinewy and fit, bespectacled man who’d played such a substantial role as the doctor of their team. Medic is wearing a turtleneck as well, a beige one that accentuates his tan skin, big blue eyes and a pearly smile that crinkles said eyes. Heavy’s and Medic’s chests are pressed together, as are their cheeks as they face the camera. The date on the bottom right corner of the picture states that it was shot in December of 1979. Five years ago. A lifetime ago.

He sets down the framed photograph when it begins to shudder in his grip. It’s just the bulkiness and weight of the frame, that’s all. Not his left hand shaking.

Unfortunately for him, the same excuse is inadmissible when he takes out a medium-sized plastic case from the box and opens it. Bullets. Twelve of them. Custom-tooled cartridges at two hundred bucks a pop. No, he has no doubt now what Heavy wishes him to do with the photographs – all of which must certainly be the lovers’ most treasured – and the bullets and the Russian and English literature books, and the knowledge makes even his biomechanical right hand tremble.

“No … _no_ , you big, stupid bastard. No. No.”

His throat is prickling, his chest constricting as he sits down hard on a chair and reaches for the envelope with his name on it. It’s thick with folded papers inside it, and god _damnit_ , what he won’t give for the letter inside to say that this is all just a dumb joke, that Heavy’s going to call him from San Francisco and laugh that booming, zesty laugh while he laughs too and swears amiably that he’ll get back at Heavy for messing with his mind – and heart, don’t forget the _heart_ – like this.

But it isn’t, it’s as far from a joke as a letter’s going to be, because it’s not a letter at all.

“I … bein’ of … sound mind, declare this to be … my Last Will _and_ –“

And he can’t read Heavy’s handwriting anymore, the world obscured by a sudden, stinging haze, his voice stolen by a clog in his throat the size of a fist. From afar, he hears paper crumpling. He can merely stare downwards through the haze at his biomechanical hand scrunching Heavy’s will into a semi-ball, even as a part of his brain chides him for the involuntary action and another part is already devising a method to smooth the paper out without further damage. Fucking hell, Heavy will never forgive him if he accidentally destroys his last words –

_Would. Would never. The present tense is only for the living._

It’s the logical, unaffected part of his brain that says that. The logical, _critical_ part of his brain that has served him so well from birth.

But tonight, it is his undoing.

He doesn’t hear Michael and Elizabeth walk into the kitchen. He doesn’t even know they aren’t in bed asleep until he feels two pairs of arms enfolding him from behind and from his left side. 

“It’s okay, Pa,” Michael murmurs above his head, his rich, low timbre a presaging of the man he will become. “It’s okay.”

He hugs them back as best he can, seated as he is at the dinner table, his biomechanical hand having let go of the papers in its merciless grip. He blinks hard. Yes … yes, in time, things will be okay once more. For him.

“I know, son. I know,” he rasps, and it’s all he can say.

  

* * *

 

“It’s inoperable.”

The two words are obscure to Heavy, incomprehensible. It has been fifty-four hours since he last slept, and all the hospital rooms and hallways and machines have distorted into an endless, panoramic smear of numb grays and sterile whites to his eyes, his nose smelling only tingling, unnatural antiseptic, his ears hearing only subdued footsteps and forlorn murmurs and the two words of the brain surgeon standing before him.

His gaze darts around the room. To the left, a dark gray wall. Down at the tiled, wooden floor. Then up again, past the surgeon’s left shoulder at the room’s rectangular, white-framed window overlooking the sun-dappled lawns and meandering paths of the hospital’s garden for patients. Then higher up at the ceiling, quickly, then down again, at the surgeon’s professionally impassive face.

He can’t look to the right, at the bed there, at the slumbering person in it, the most important person in the universe to him. He can’t, not with those two words hanging in the air waiting for him to acknowledge them. Not yet.

“You cannot cut it out?”

The surgeon – whose name Heavy cannot remember, not at this minute – gazes back at him. The surgeon is a tall man, tall enough that their eyes can meet with neither man bowing or craning their heads. The surgeon’s lined visage is a blank slate, but his brown eyes are not. There is an emotion in them that’s also obscure to Heavy. His weary mind won’t let him identify it, not now, _not yet_ , not until he’s alone with his other half and the rest of the world can’t see him collapse into the miniscule speck he feels like in this very moment in time.

“The risk of severe brain damage is very high if we attempt an operation now. The risk of him bleeding out on the operating table is also very high. I strongly recommend chemotherapy first before deciding to attempt any removal of the tumor.”

Heavy glances out the window once more, at a lush topiary in the garden that its landscaper had trimmed into an elephant.

_I zhink a topiary like zhat vill look quite nice vith zhe roses vhen zhey bloom in zhe summer. Don’t you zhink so, mein Liebling?_

Heavy has to suck in a deep, slow breath before he can say with a steady voice, “If chemotherapy does not make tumor smaller?”

“We’ll see how it goes, and work out a plan from there.”

He knows how rude it is that he isn’t looking at the surgeon at all now while speaking to him. On any other day, any other time, in another world where he was alone and he was confronting the same enemy that he could fire his Minigun at, again and again and again till it was dead, he would be laughing right now. Laughing at this powerless, spineless twin of himself, at the terminal disease that wasn’t so indomitable after all, not compared to him.

But in this world, it is. An invisible, invincible killer, greater than any foe he has ever encountered in his lifetime. A foe he can’t shoot. A foe he can’t slay.

A foe that’s slaying the most important person in the universe to him, the man he loves more than anything in said universe.

“If chemotherapy does not make tumor smaller?” he reiterates, lower, firmer, and without glancing at the surgeon, he knows the white-haired man will give him the answer he _needs_ to hear this time.

Seconds, as long as centuries, tick by in a silence vibrating with tension.

Then, softly, the surgeon says, “If the tumor doesn’t shrink enough after chemotherapy for safe surgery … the best estimate I can give is six months. Eight, at most.”

The elephant topiary is an ashen gray to Heavy’s eyes. It appears dull and _dead_ to him, and he can’t imagine why his beloved would want a monstrosity like that in their home garden. Their garden is magnificent, painstakingly maintained and cultivated since they moved into their cozy bungalow in the suburbs fifteen years ago, a paradise on earth overflowing with color and iridescence and _life_.

“Mr. Volkov?”

In time, perhaps after another century, he turns his head to gaze at the surgeon’s face. The man is awaiting an answer, one which should have been obvious as soon as the grim sentence was passed.

“Chemotherapy. Immediately,” he replies gruffly, and the surgeon says, “I’ll be back with Dr. Hudson to discuss the treatment plan with you. Okay?”

Heavy nods, already shuffling away from the other man, going to the cushioned chair on the left side of the occupied bed to sit on it like he has for the past two days of tests and tests and more tests. He doesn’t hear the click of the door shutting when the surgeon leaves the room. He doesn’t sense the sunshine pouring down his hunched back and slumped shoulders through the window. He only sees the reclined figure bundled up in blankets on the bed, sleeping so soundly, so peacefully. So unaware of the resonant ticking of the clock counting down their years – no, mere months, weeks, _days_ – to the very last hour.

Medic remains asleep as Heavy tenderly caresses his cheek with the back of unsteady, massive fingers.

Medic is also an ashen gray to Heavy’s damp eyes, now.

 

* * *

 

(To be continued ...)

 

 


End file.
